Portrait of a Lady (Sandro Botticelli)
The Portrait of a Lady is a panel painting by the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli , which was created between 1475 and 1480. Botticelli was an Italian artist of the early modern period and, among other things, painted idealized portraits of the Florentine nobility.
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| Portrait of a lady |
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| Sandro Botticelli , 1475-1480 |
| Tempera on poplar wood |
| 47.5 × 35 cm |
| Berlin State Museums, Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin Picture Gallery |
Material and technology
The painting Portrait of a Lady was created using the tempera technique on poplar wood with the dimensions 47.5 × 35 cm. Due to the format, the portrait appears life-size.
Attribution
To this day, Botticelli's authorship in the execution of the painting is discussed in research. The Italian art historian Giovanni Morelli described it as a product of the master himself, while Wilhelm von Bode , art historian and head of the Gemäldegalerie zu Berlin from 1890 to 1905, described the painting as workshop work.
description
The portrait shows the profile of a young woman who is in a darkened room in front of a window. The decoration of the bust and the idealized type of woman Botticelli used show that it is an ideal female portrait.
The sitter has feminine features, a slender neck, a high forehead and a flawless complexion. She has an elaborately designed head of hair with pearls and ribbons that hold plaited braids together. Botticelli often uses the magnificent hair accessories in mythological depictions of nymphs . She wears a contemporary red cotton velvet dress with a black bodice and slit sleeves.
iconography
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| Ideal female portrait |
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| Sandro Botticelli , 1475-1480 |
| Tempera on poplar wood |
| 82 × 54 cm |
| Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main |
Wilhelm von Bode suspected that it was a fantasy by Botticelli, since the painter repeatedly used the same idealized type of woman in the depictions of Our Lady and Venus .
The delicate facial features are often used in allegorical portraits by Botticelli and were considered an ideal conception of femininity. Have received three additional versions with variations in hairstyle and clothes by the research of the art historian Aby Warburg with Simonetta Vespucci be linked. In the young woman's face, Warburg recognized the noble Simonetta Vespucci , who at the time was considered the most beautiful woman in Florence.
“It probably showed Simonetta Vespucci , whose beauty the poet Angelo Poliziano also praised. After her tragic early death, Simonetta was remembered as an ideal of virtuous beauty alongside Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura. "
Botticelli's ideal female portrait around 1480 shows Simonetta Vespucci in the mythological disguise of a nymph with a cameo follower of the Medici family. The ideal female portrait is a larger-than-life panel painting measuring 82 × 54 cm and is shown in the Old Masters Collection in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt .
Recent research treats the panel painting as an ideal portrait of a woman rather than an actual portrait of Simonetta Vespucci .
Provenance
Like Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus , the painting was probably commissioned for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de 'Medici's Villa di Castello and a homage to the love of Giuliano di Piero de' Medicis for Simonetta Vespucci , whose face it presumably represents.
The portrait of a lady was acquired in 1875 from the Palazzo Medici-Riccard i by the art dealer Stefano Bardini in Florence for the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. It was identified at that time with the help of another portrait of Simonetta Vespucci , which Giorgio Vasari mentioned in his Vita Botticelli .
literature
- Barbara Deimling: Sandro Botticelli, Cologne 2004, ISBN 978-3-8228-9607-5 .
- Ana Debenedetti, Caroline Elam (Eds.): Botticelli Past and Present , UCL Press, 2019, online .
- Mark Evans, Stephan Weppelmann, Ana Debenedetti, Ruben Rebmann (eds.): The Botticelli Renaissance . Exhib. Cat. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 2015–2016, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2370-8 .
- Hans Körner: Botticelli , DuMont Verlag, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-8321-7316-6 .
- Hans Körner: Simonetta Vespucci and the love discourse in the early Florentine Renaissance . In: Jörn Steigerwald, Valeska von Rosen (ed.): Amor sacro e profano. Models and modeling of love in literature and painting of the Italian Renaissance , Wiesbaden 2012.
- Hans Körner: Naked bodies against a black background. The consequences of Sandro Botticelli's foam-born Venus . In: Hans Körner, Sandra Abend (Ed.): Vor -bilder. Icons of cultural history: from hand ax to Botticelli's Venus to John Wayne , Munich 2015.
- Hans Körner: "Piu femmine gnude bellissime". Decontextualization as an artistic and economic strategy in the work of Sandro Botticelli , Florence 2015.
- Ronald W. Lightbrown: Sandro Botticelli. Life and Work , Hirmer Verlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3777451509 .
- Frank Zöllner : Sandro Botticelli , Prestel Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-7913-8193-0 .
Web links
- Online database of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Profile portrait of a young woman
- Berlin State Museums: The Botticelli Renaissance
- Städel Museum Frankfurt: ideal female portrait
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gemäldegalerie zu Berlin (ed.): The Botticelli Renaissance . Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2370-8 , pp. 309 .
- ↑ Gemäldegalerie zu Berlin (ed.): The Botticelli Renaissance . Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2370-8 , pp. 309-310 .
- ↑ Vespucci, Simonetta nell'Enciclopedia Treccani. Retrieved June 24, 2020 (it-IT).
- ↑ Gemäldegalerie zu Berlin (ed.): The Botticelli Renaissance . Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2370-8 , pp. 311 .
- ↑ Profile portrait of a young woman (Simonetta Vespucci?). In: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on the museum-digital website. Retrieved July 14, 2020 .
- ↑ Profile portrait of a young woman (Simonetta Vespucci?). In: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on the museum-digital website. Retrieved July 14, 2020 .